


Rambling Backstory Headcanons

by mitzirocker



Category: Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2019-10-08 02:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17377868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker
Summary: A series of host backstory headcanons I started and never finished, though I would like to come back to them someday.





	1. Red

  * ten years old
  * lives in this tiny coastal village that’d probably be a resort town in a world with aeroplanes
  * as it is the only reason they put it on the maps is Professor Oak’s lab
  * Red’s spent most of his childhood orbiting the place. Begging Oak to let him help with experiments, sneaking in to read the huge heavy books in the front of the lab… The most exciting time in his life was the month or so it took to install the computers
  * he learned to read and write so he could make notes about the pokemon on route 1, just like a real scientist!
  * Red knows Blue because he’s the only other kid in town who spends most of his time skulking around the lab. He’s friends with Blue because he’s the only other kid in town who has *~dreams~*
  * Red’s dream is to become a great scientist. His idol worship of Oak confuses Blue
  * Blue’s dream is to be the strongest in Kanto. He hasn’t thought about what he’ll do next; the strongest in Kanto has options, he figures
  * On a clear day, when you sit on the roof of the old watchtower, you can see the Indigo Plateau. Over the past year, Red and Blue have watched the ancient castle of Illusio turn into the Pokemon League
  * they’ve been making plans to take the gym challenge and enter the league for months. Red’s mother was against it, but Blue’s grandfather talked her into it, saying he could get them really strong first partners
  * and they’re here! One for Red, one for Blue, one for the lab. Oak won’t tell them what they are before they leave town tomorrow
  * Red’s packed a water bottle and a mountain of dried food and an extra set of clothes and some insect repellent and a sleeping bag and a note to give to the lavender tower channelers and a special pair of goggles that work like glasses
  * he takes so long to go to sleep that as he’s nodding off he feels something distant rip open
  * the next morning, there are twenty thousand voices in his head




	2. AJ

  * eleven years old
  * grew up in a shack in the Tohjo Mountains
  * left home every day at dawn and came home at dusk. He’d race down slopes, wander through valleys, explore caves, sneak around ursaring, run from golem, find the perfect spot to watch the charizard fly around their nests
  * sometimes he’d meet hikers or karate masters on journeys of self-discovery, but mostly it was just him, his mummy, his mama, and the mountains
  * then one night reality screamed
  * there were earthquakes and storms and avalanches and floods. Strange new pokemon fled through the passes, and several terrified refugees told them Kanto was basically on fire. When some of the smaller mountains started collapsing in on themselves, his mummy loaded up their skarmory and took her family to New Bark Town
  * that was three years ago
  * AJ  _hates_  New Bark. It’s all cramped and tidy, and people are furious if you so much as think about taking a shortcut through their garden. He’s a kid used to roaming as far as he can walk in a day, and now he’s trapped in a tiny farming village
  * and he’s never left alone! There’s always some grownup giving him long stares, or some kid asking him weird questions and laughing at him when he tells them to Go. Away. People are so weird, and they expect you to act exactly like them or they bully you for breaking the rules you were never told
  * (he used to have a friend from New Bark Town, a girl three years younger than him who loved the forests like he loved the mountains. Three years ago she was in a boat, and there was a volcano, and she died)
  * the only person in New Bark Town who’s kind of okay is Professor Elm. He’s an old friend of AJ’s mummy, and he lets AJ play with the hatchlings in the lab. One day he asked Elm why he had so many baby pokemon, and that’s how AJ learned about the gym challenge
  * he begged his parents to let him go. His mama told him that there were very bad people around these days, so bad that everyone in New Bark Town had come here to hide from them. AJ told her that one time he’d been chased all over by an angry tyranitar and had to hide in the river to get away and he’d still got back home before dusk
  * several months of paperwork later there’s only one more night to go before he’s free. The professor’s bringing in some specially trained pokemon to help him out, but AJ doesn’t think he needs help to traipse around the wilderness finding neat stuff
  * his mummy’s given him a portable two-way radio thingy called a pokegear. He’s promised his mama he’ll call home every night




	3. Girl A

  * thirteen years old
  * probably
  * see, Hoenn’s where the fossil gods of perception and flourishing life were sealed
  * and when they came out to play everyone within two hundred miles of Route 111 lost their minds
  * one day, three years later, the entire region came back to sanity
  * instantly. It was like a switch had been flipped
  * people found themselves crouching in burnt-out cities, hiding in caves and on tiny islands, lost in rainforests in places where there should be open water, surrounded by unfamiliar pokemon and strange people
  * Norman, a  ~~deep cover Rocket operative~~ _trainer from the Viridian Gym_ , found himself halfway up a tree with a toddler clinging to his back
  * he never went back to Kanto. Even when they got the ferries running again he reasoned that the two regions were in equally bad shape but Hoenn had one fewer psychotic death cult
  * instead he decided to raise the girl he assumed was his daughter in a tiny village a day’s walk from the ruins of Petalburg
  * ten years later, there are rivers where there are supposed to be rivers and none of the trees should have gone extinct a hundred million years ago and the pokemon migration patterns have stabilised and the League has restarted and there are contests in Lilycove again and an eighth gym leader has been chosen and Team Magma and Team Aqua have stopped working on relief efforts and started causing trouble and the Latii have been sighted. Hoenn is healing
  * most people think this is a good thing. Camila disagrees
  * they’re children of a new world, she told Brendan once. The adults are stealing their destiny and pretending everything’s exactly the way it was before. So what if it is, he replied. The world before was a lot safer
  * as far as Camila can tell, ‘safe’ means ‘boring’. When she wasn’t supposed to go to Petalburg because it was ‘too dangerous’ visiting it was an amazing adventure. Now they want her to live there, after they’ve repaired the buildings and chased out the zangoose. She has to sneak out of town in the middle of the night to study dark magic, the coolest thing she knows about. Even in her vague memories of her early childhood - she’s scared, yes, but she’s also excited
  * but the world just keeps getting duller. The town she grew up in is emptying as everyone moves to Petalburg (’back to’ Petalburg, they say. she bets most of them have never seen it.) Littleroot was built with wood and clay, and when people leave they tear down their houses
  * a few years back, Brendan’s dad took them to Slateport. The city was built after the Forgotten Years, and she remembers it was so alive
  * soon she’ll be leaving Littleroot too. Her dad’s the new gym leader, a job that isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds, and he’s making her come with him because she burned the house down four years ago
  * it’ll be her, her dad, her dad’s stupid girlfriend, and a warehouse full of losers who hold back in battles. She won’t even be able to argue with Brendan any more because he’s staying in Littleroot, the jerk
  * she used to be a lot grouchier about this, but then kids started dying
  * there’s been one a night, every night, for a week. They find the kids in the morning, frozen in a scream, clutching their hands to their ears. This morning she saw one of the corpses. Its eyes had turned solid purple
  * Camila’s dad gets visitors from Kanto sometimes. They tell her stories
  * she’s made this ritual in a hurry. If she waits, one of the kids they pick won’t die and she’ll miss her chance. There’s no time to sneak into the woods, so she draws the command circle in the dirt outside the lab
  * she writes the spell and stamps it into the circle, readying the magic. The aether tastes different tonight. They’re back, and she needs to get their attention now. Time to activate it - “Camila!”
  * it’s Brendan. He’s in his pajamas, stumbling out of his house. The light in his dad’s room is on. “What are you doing?!”
  * “My name is Girl A, and i’ll turn this region upside down.” She bites into a pomeg berry, and the Voices drown out the world




	4. Alice

  * twelve years old
  * lives with her dad in a lighthouse on Cerulean Cape
  * one of her earliest memories is of clambering around the grassy dunes looking for interesting plants
  * there was a clump of very green grass. She reached out to pick it, but it popped out of the ground and ran away!
  * she toddled after it, chubby fingers reaching. She was getting closer when - “ALICE!”
  * her dad was running towards her, leaping over brambles and between dunes. She’d never seen him like this before, never ever, so she stopped chasing the plant and hoped she wasn’t in trouble
  * he scooped her up in his arms and hugged her tightly. He tried to tell her something - she doesn’t remember what it was, because about three words in he started crying
  * he carried her back to the lighthouse, burying her head in his shirt, sobbing. She must have been crying too, because when he finally put her down her vision was all red
  * it took a week for him to sit down with her and explain, carefully, that most things that move on their own don’t appreciate being grabbed all of a sudden, and if you force it, they can get dangerous. It took a year for him to let her leave the lighthouse
  * thinking back on these memories, what strikes her is that the pokemon she was trying to catch must have been an oddish
  * but there are no oddish near Cerulean Cape. There’s a herd of nidoran, lots of wooper, a few miscellaneous bug-types, a togetic couple’s nest, sometimes a vulpix den, but the nearest oddish live in Viridian Forest
  * she asked her dad about it once. He muttered something about trainers who didn’t know where to release their pokemon
  * Alice isn’t too sure about that. Pokemon population patterns are so strange anyway, what’s to say there isn’t a population of oddish hiding in a cave a little way up the coast? She doesn’t have a pokemon of her own and her dad’s mon aren’t exactly combat-worthy, so she can’t go check
  * yet
  * she first met Professor Oak when her dad was in Viridian City doing something to the Pokecentre PC. The professor had come up from Pallet because he wanted to talk to her dad, and he’d brought his grandson and his grandson’s best friend to get them out of their families’ collective hair
  * Red and Green were the first friends she’d ever made that weren’t pokemon or her dad. She thought Red was the professor’s grandson for an embarrassingly long time
  * she liked Red better than Green. She could talk to Red about all the things he learned from the professor. Green only wanted to talk about gross things, and he was always calling her a baby
  * still. She would always look forward to their trips to Pallet Town, and while her dad and the professor would talk about computers or something Alice, Red, and Green would play together all over the village
  * the boys were two years older than her, so they got to go on their pokemon journeys first. Her dad was in a paranoid mood when they left Pallet, so she couldn’t see them off. They stayed at the lighthouse for a whole week to make up for it
  * Red showed off his seadra and cribbed notes from her pokedex. He told her he’d catch her a pokemon to take on her journey
  * a year later, he was dead
  * no one would tell her how he died. At the funeral she pestered Green for an hour until he snapped
  * “a psychopath leapt out of the bushes and tore his throat out with his fingernails”
  * she asked - demanded, really - why Green hadn’t saved their friend. The argument got very ugly very fast
  * on the way back, her dad told her he didn’t think it was wise for her to start her journey so soon after. She didn’t disagree with him
  * that was two, nearly three, years ago
  * a month ago, the professor told her dad he’d gotten a new shipment of starters, and did Alice want one?
  * yes, she decided. Yes
  * she’s come back to Pallet for the first time since  _then_. Green’s in town, he won’t tell her why, and she suspects they’d be avoiding each other if she wasn’t staying at his house
  * as it is, she’s trying to be nice. Perhaps they can be friends for real this time
  * and anyway, she’s excited! New pokemon to befriend! A whole region to explore without her dad breathing down her back! The professor gave her her pokedex early, and she’d probably have fallen asleep reading it if Daisy hadn’t locked it in the lab
  * just like her dad on a coding binge. The older she gets, the more she understands him, useless lump that he is




	5. Napoleon

  * sixteen years old
  * from Veilstone City
  * it’s a big city by pokeverse standards; the population’s in the tens of thousands. There are districts and schools and buildings with ten stories and the best nightlife north of Hoenn and a wall from the Ransei era it’s long since outgrown
  * Napoleon and Johanna lived in the decent part of town. Despite her hobby being trying to make the Veilstone contest scene a thing, he grew up without pokemon
  * Johanna’s kangashkan lived on a farm outside the city with a bunch of other pokemon too big to fit in a house
  * Johanna took Napoleon to visit when he was four. It was the worst day of his life. There were too many monsters, so big and fast and unpredictable. He ended up hiding in the farmhouse for half the time. She never took him again
  * but being suspicious of pokemon wasn’t really a problem in Veilstone. Not a lot of people kept them - partially because of the lack of space, partially because of the lingering randomisations - and aside from the ever-present starly flocks you didn’t really see any. Being wary around pokemon was also something people understood in Veilstone. The randomisation was awful
  * besides, he already has a ~lifelong companion
  * Napoleon and Pearl were in the same class, and were aware of each other for a good while before they became friends. Pearl has a dozen different stories about the incident, but all Napoleon remembers is that the weird kid with the stupid scarf was digging himself further into trouble with every word
  * he pitied the kid a little, so he tried to drag him out of there, it escalated, and by the time it was over Napoleon had a week-long suspension from school and a best friend for life
  * Pearl is annoying and hyperactive and over-affectionate and is  _amazing_  at talking himself into trouble. Sometimes Napoleon wonders why he hangs around with him
  * but then Pearl will help him out for no reason or tell a really bad joke and Napoleon will be reminded that he’s the most genuine person he knows
  * in the circles Napoleon used to run in, that was a rare trait indeed
  * Napoleon first came to the Game Corner when he was ten. He wanted more pocket money, and here was a way to get some for free
  * it took him two months (and a loan from Pearl) to make any cash back
  * if it had just been about the cash, though, he would have given up after the third attempt. He stayed because there was a logic to the machines and games. Tricks, puzzles… He’d always been good at maths
  * and slowly, he started winning
  * he began to hang out at the Game Corner whenever he wasn’t in school. Even when he wasn’t gambling, he’d lurk around the area, exploring the seedy underbelly of Veilstone. It got to the point where he was sleeping through class and spending the nights touring the underworld
  * he told Pearl after the first night, and didn’t even have to convince him to join in. He didn’t tell Johanna
  * Napoleon spent his early teens orbiting the Game Corner, playing every night for the chance to win big and observing the freak show that patronised the place. He bought nice jackets and the coolest shades and a bitchin’ cravat, tried many suspicious substances, and met several interesting people
  * Pearl was still Pearl, so he still got himself into trouble and needed Napoleon to get him out of it. There’s a reason he can punch hard enough to knock a guy’s teeth out
  * life was exhilarating. You could win a fortune one day and lose it the next. Of course, then you needed to get more money
  * Napoleon was mildly in debt to the wannabe-Rockets that operated out of the back of the game corner, but so were all the regulars. The problem came when he turned fifteen, had a massive celebration, and became very in debt
  * their boss told him all his debts would be cleared if he just helped with one little operation
  * it went badly
  * one night, at three in the morning, after he’d been gone for a week and half, he stumbled into Johanna’s flat, dazed and bruised. After he’d gotten medical attention she demanded to know what had happened
  * he started telling her a story about a construction project gone wrong. She cut him off three sentences in. “I know where you go at night.”
  * under her withering glare, he snapped and told her everything
  * they left before the end of the month. He sold most of his fancy clothes, settled his debts with the wannabe-Rockets, and gave his coin case to a particularly hopeless acquaintance
  * Pearl stayed in Veilstone. What was there for them in the country?
  * a year on, Napoleon kind of agrees with him
  * Twinleaf Town is bucolic. There’s absolutely nothing to do; for a while, that was a relief, but now it’s just boring
  * and there are pokemon  _everywhere_. He’s not afraid of them  ~~anymore~~ , he just doesn’t like pokemon! Why is this such a difficult concept?!
  * Johanna’s been talking about moving to Hearthome. He thinks he’ll go to Jubilife and get a job at some technology startup. He hung around Bebe for a bit, he knows his way around basic
  * eventually. For now, Pearl is crashing at their house
  * by which he means hiding at their house. Apparently he pissed off some new underground faction and now half of Veilstone wants him dead. He’s come to Twinleaf because it’s right next to Sandgem, and he figures fieldwork for Professor Rowan is the perfect excuse to run off into the wilderness until the heat dies down
  * Napoleon is totally unsurprised. He figures he’ll go with Pearl for a bit and glare at suspicious people until Pearl’s pokemon gets strong enough to defend him
  * he realises this will require him to be in the near vicinity of many pokemon for weeks on end, but without his amazing punching powers Pearl is probably going to die
  * he really doesn’t want that to happen. Him and Pearl, they have Plans



**Author's Note:**

> After this, I made a post about Aoooo that I was kinda unsatisfied with. I took it down. I intended to redo it, but I never got around to it, and now it's two years later and I'm remembering how much fun these were to do. Like I said, if I find the time and motivation, I would like to get back to this series.


End file.
